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local communities | MIT Center for Civic Media

People in local geographic areas may need help communicating with each other in order to collaborate in building and sustaining healthy communities. Grassroots action at any level - neighborhoods, towns, or cities - can help improve local services, welcome newcomers, and develop cultural, economic and political capital.

Concerned with mass production and unidirectional flow of goods. Especially important for hackers because of electronic goods. How do we change this?

Tiffany Rad, @TiffanyRad, Pianos and Cars

When you buy something, do you own it, and how much of it?
Concerned about ownership of private information, GPS etc, in cars. You don't own the software, and could void the warranty by disabling features you don't want.

If you have to break cryptography to fix your car, you may void your warranty and may violate the DMCA. There has been a push for "Right to Repair Acts." These have succeeded in Massachusetts and Oregon.

Jiffy Lube and AutoZone lobbied for standardized access to diagnostic tools. Available by 2018. Only licensed mechanics are covered by these agreements.

In this Meet-Up we broke out into groups to talk about common problems related to diversity in tech and to brainstorm solutions. This documents the reports that each breakout group gave.

Problem: How to balance radical inclusion with creating safe spaces for minorities?
Solution: Encourage meaningful interactions that go beyond "don't do this."
Solution: Make space sometimes available to closed groups.

Problem: Tech has an image of lacking diversity, which turns people off.
Solution: Help diverse communities develop technical skills internally.

Problem: Differences in ingrained communication styles. The loudest voice often wins.
Solution: Employ different techniques, e.g. roundtables. Encourage a focus on awareness of language, such as gender neutrality.

Problem: How to move from being unaware of a lack of diversity to making improvements.

Problem: Narrow definitions of success, such as entrepreneurial stereotype.

Live blogged by Rahul Bhargava and Matt StempeckMonday, June 23, 2014 - 3:45pm

The Internet lowers coordination costs, making it easier for groups of people to cooperate and work together. Despite this, it's often been hard to apply the lessons of online cooperation to the world of civics. A set of exciting new projects and initiatives offers hope for what's possible and a clearer sense of the challenges of using the web to participate in offline social change.

This last Tuesday, the Cambridge Licensing Commission held a hearing to discuss regulations concerning unregistered cabs, including transportation network companies (think Uber, Lyft, SideCar—peer-to-peer platforms that offer private point-to-point car service) and rogue cabs (not registered with the city and not participants with a TNC). A proposal—Regulations for Smartphone Technology for Taxicabs and Limousines—served as grounding for the discussion around how to regulate private transportation and/or update the definition of private transportation. An alert went out over email to the Media Lab community, and I attended the hearing. As the only ML community member who attended the hearing in full, I sent back a report. I've been encouraged to share it here. It has been slightly altered to provide links and to make it coherent outside of the Media Lab community.

Last month at the Media Lab, Helena, Jen, Michaela and I organized Build Peace, a conference to bring together practitioners from the worlds of peacebuilding and technology to talk about how the two fields could work together. It was an incredibly enlightening and generative three days, and before the first conference had even finished, we had already decided that there needed to be a Build Peace 2015. If you missed it, you can catch up by reading Helena's lookback. We’re excited by the community that is starting to form around the technology for peacebuilding conversation and the many potential spin-off projects that are emerging. We were incredibly lucky to have such a diverse and talented array of participants and collaborators.

Today I'm capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master's thesis to the MIT archives. Great thanks are due to the wonderful collaborators I've had the privilege of working with. I won't name everyone here, but all of you folks will find your names in the Acknowledgments section.

There’s a tradition in Peru called the pollada – literally, a chicken party. These parties perform a very important social function. Say I’m about to have a child and I’m worried about how I’m going to pay education or healthcare bills. I hold a pollada to raise money by inviting friends and family around for chicken and beers, and selling tickets to the event. The tickets are usually priced fairly highly. The friends who come to my party are willing to pay more than they would normally, because they know they’re contributing to my family's welfare. Together, we fund the future of my family’s education. And we eat. And we bond.

Most meetings and events suck. I'm lucky enough to know lots of folks trying to make this better. Recently Civic Media hosted Gunner from Aspiration Tech for a training on how to create and facilitate participatory events. Afterwards I was inspired to reflect more on my own approach to facilitating the workshops and events I run. A key reflection for me was that I put a strong emphasis on the process of collaboratively making of things. Our Data Therapy workshops and events are "think with your hands" events. Almost every topic is tied to a hands-on activity where you make something with your peers. This is how we invite participants to engage in the material - through the process of making things.